This paper employs stochastic frontier cost and profit models to estimate economies of scale as well as X-efficiency for multi-billion dollar European and U.S. banks in the period 1995-1999. Empirical results with respect to separate analyses of large European and U.S. banks are strikingly...

This paper provides a critical assessment of the costs and benefits of foreign bank ownership. It reviews the extensive literature on the impact of foreign banks and uses a unique database on bank ownership, covering 129 countries, to (re-)examine a number of the issues discussed. It documents...

The traditional gravity model has been applied many times to international trade flows, especially in order to analyze trade creation and trade diversion. However, there are two fundamental objections to the model: it cannot describe substitutions between flows and it lacks a cogent theoretical...

Several attempts have been made in the economics literature to measure money laundering. However, the adequacy of these models is difficult to assess, as money laundering takes place secretly and, hence, goes unobserved. An exception is trade-based money laundering (TBML), a special form of...

International trade relies on trade finance (credit or insurance) by financial institutions. Data limitations, however, have made it difficult to quantify the impact of changes in the supply of trade finance on trade. This paper is the first to establish a causal link between the supply of...

We use panel data on the intra-group ownership structure and balance sheets of 45 of the largest banking groups from 1992 to 2004 to analyse what determines the credit growth of multinational bank subsidiaries. Both home- and host-country conditions and characteristics of the subsidiaries...

We use data on the 48 largest multinational banking groups to compare the lending of their 199 foreign subsidiaries during the Great Recession with lending by a benchmark group of 202 domestic banks. Contrary to earlier, more contained crises, parent banks were not a significant source of...